1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a lighting control device that controls the turn-on state and the turn-off state of a lighting apparatus provided in a room.
2. Related Art
When an air-conditioning apparatus and a lighting apparatus are provided in a room, the operation of these apparatuses is inputted from the individual separate operating means. Specifically, the air-conditioning apparatus is provided with a control panel that includes a switch for instructing activation/deactivation of the apparatus and a temperature sensor for acquiring the room temperature. Also, the lighting apparatus is provided with a switch for switching the state thereof from a turn-off state to a turn-on state, or vice versa. Therefore, generally, two or more operating means are arranged such as on a wall of a room.
If these operating means are integrated into a single operating means, the integrated operating means can be arranged at a position at which the user can more easily manipulate the operating means and thus the usability may be enhanced. Further, the integrated operating means can contribute to reducing the number of parts arranged on a wall. Accordingly, the integrated operating means may easily harmonize with the interior design of the room and achieve a high satisfaction level of the user. In this case, since a control panel is essential such as to setting a temperature, it is more practical to provide a switch for the lighting apparatus in the control panel.
However, simply integrating the switch of the lighting apparatus with the control panel may increase the size of the control panel, leading to suppressing the enhancement of usability and the harmonization with the interior design of the room as mentioned above.
As a measure against this in the related art, for example, the temperature sensing means of the air-conditioning apparatus may be replaced by a sensing element having multiple functions, as disclosed in JP-A-H09-297054. However, in this case, the cost incurred in producing the parts may be increased. In addition, in this case, it is required to configure and add logic such as detecting a person. Since such detection logic is not used in the related art, construction and addition of the detection logic will increase processing loads of the control panel.